Pirots NZ

Pirots NZ: the short version

ELK Studios launched this series with Pirots in March 2023, and CollectR made its debut here. Forget paylines. On a 5x5 grid, four birds step across gems that match their colour, and every gem pays out at the moment a bird picks it up. It's all dressed up as a pirate island: the grid hangs in a ship's rigging, and the meter ends at a treasure chest.

Our sources are the game's own paytable screens and X-iter panel, along with ELK's product and data sheets. Reviews came second, and whenever one clashed with the screens, we sided with the screens. Two figures get quoted differently around the web, and this settles both: 8x8 is the biggest grid, and 10,000x bet is the top win.

There's a reason the screen looks so busy in ELK Pirots. A single paid spin may involve a string of drops while gems climb levels and bombs push the grid wider. This Pirots game takes longer to read than a pokie with lines, which is why we go through it below, one rule after another.

Launch day: 6 or 7 March? Third-party listings split between 6 and 7 March 2023. We couldn't find a date from ELK, so we stop at March 2023. Play isn't affected either way.

How to play Pirots

1. Read the five paytable screens first, using the menu at the top left.
2. Use the coin stack icon to pick a stake between NZ$0.20 and NZ$100.
3. Spin once, keeping your eyes on the birds and whatever is next to them.
4. Track the first collection. Gems pay at their level and the gaps fill back up.
5. Keep an eye on the scroll over the grid as it creeps towards three chests.
6. Tally the anchors beneath the scroll. Get three in a round and the Bonus Game starts.
7. Leave the X-iter tab until the base game makes sense, and weigh each price against your balance.
8. Check the RTP on the Rules screen, since that's the version you actually loaded.

How CollectR pays without paylines

Diagonals don't count. A bird can only grab what's right above it, right below it or on either side. Once it steps onto a matching gem it keeps going from the new spot, which means the red bird can clear a run of red gems even if the run bends round a corner. Feature symbols play by different rules, since they're open to any bird.

Payment happens on collection, with each gem worth whatever its current level says. The grid then loses those symbols and fresh ones fall into the gaps. You'll know this as tumbling from other slots, though here it's called drops, and a game round is the full set of drops from one paid spin.

Bombs are what make the grid bigger. According to reviews, each explosion adds a row and a column, and the paytable screen sets the ceiling at 8x8. Does a larger grid survive from one paid base-game round into the next? We found no rule text that says, so look at the Rules screen if your staking depends on it.

The feature meter is the parchment scroll over the grid, with a chest waiting at the far end. Every collected symbol pushes it along, and a full meter pays out three chests of feature symbols. Reviews describe those chests landing in random spots, each one showing a coin win, wild, grid expander, symbol upgrade, symbol transform or bonus symbol. ELK's product sheet lists the same six types.

Top grid size: 7x7 or 8x8? You may come across a catalogue note saying 7x7, but nothing backs it up. The Feature Symbols paytable screen says 8x8, reviews say the same, and so do we.

Meet the Fearful Four

The rules don't name individual birds, just the group, which ELK calls the Fearful Four, so colour is how we tell them apart. Gems are strictly one colour per bird, while feature symbols are shared among all four. In practice that matters. Take a white upgrade symbol: it raises the colour of the bird that collects it, so the first bird to get there decides how much the round is worth.

Red birdRed gems, plus every feature symbol

Wears a pirate hat and has a little parrot perched on its shoulder. Its red gems pay the most.

Purple birdPurple gems, plus every feature symbol

Has an eyepatch and a scruffy pink crest. Purple gems rank second for value.

Green birdGreen gems, plus every feature symbol

Carries a cutlass under heavy brows. Its gems begin cheap and have the steepest climb.

Blue birdBlue gems, plus every feature symbol

Bandana, wide eyes. Blue gems are the lowest payers, so a blue chain needs help from upgrades.

What each Pirots symbol does

Symbol	Name	What it does	Why it matters
	Red gem Gem	Per gem, it pays 0.25x bet at level 1, then 0.50x, 1x and 3x, topping out at 15x on level 5.	Upgrading this colour late does the most to a round.
	Purple gem Gem	Worth 0.10x bet per gem at level 1, rising through 0.20x, 0.40x and 1.20x to 7.50x at level 5.	Half of what a top red pays, once at level 5.
	Green gem Gem	Starts at 0.05x bet per gem on level 1, moves to 0.15x, 0.30x and 0.90x, then 5x on level 5.	Upgrades are mostly what make it count.
	Blue gem Gem	Begins at 0.05x bet per gem on level 1, followed by 0.10x, 0.20x and 0.60x, ending at 3x on level 5.	A long chain at low level looks lively but returns very little.
	Gold W Wild	Stands in for any gem, at the win level that gem has reached. Reviews add that another bird can still use it, as it stays on the grid.	Its value never goes past the level of the gem it replaces.
	Gold coin Coin	Collecting it pays the printed number times your bet. The art on the paytable runs from 5x up to 1000x.	Open to all four birds, so a weak round can still get a boost from it.
	Max Win coin Coin	Carries the words Max Win where a number would go. According to reviews, it awards the maximum win.	One pickup hits the cap, and no odds have been published that we could find.
	Skull bomb Feature	Goes off once no wins are left in view. Nearby non-feature symbols vanish, a redrop follows and the grid gets bigger.	All four birds end up with extra room.
	White upgrade arrow Feature	Raises gems in the collecting bird's colour by 1 to 3 levels, with level 5 the ceiling.	What it's worth comes down to the bird that takes it.
	Multicoloured upgrade arrow Feature	Raises every one of the four gem colours by 1 to 3 levels, again stopping at level 5.	Every upgrade symbol in the Super Bonus behaves like this one.
	Rum barrel Feature	Changes surrounding gems to the collecting bird's colour, or swaps them for a random number of feature symbols.	One bird might get a whole block of gems from a single barrel.
	Golden anchor Bonus	Get three collected within one game round and the Bonus Game starts. The anchors beneath the meter show how far along you are.	Finish a round on two anchors and you get nothing for them.

Pirots paytable

Multiples of your bet for each gem collected, taken from the Symbol Payout screen with the bet at NZ$1.

Gem	Level 1	Level 2	Level 3	Level 4	Level 5
Red	0.25x	0.50x	1x	3x	15x
Purple	0.10x	0.20x	0.40x	1.20x	7.50x
Green	0.05x	0.15x	0.30x	0.90x	5x
Blue	0.05x	0.10x	0.20x	0.60x	3x

The top coin value. Figures for the biggest coin run anywhere from 500x to 10,000x bet. Our number for the numbered coin is 1000x, which is what the first paytable screen prints. The Max Win coin we count as its own symbol, with unpublished odds.

Where bigger pays come from

You won't find a running multiplier in Pirots. Nothing in the rules climbs drop by drop and then gets applied to the total. The value comes from elsewhere: gems rising through levels, and coins worth a set multiple of what you bet.

Most of the range lives in the gem levels. Take a green gem to level 5 and it pays 100 times what it paid at level 1, and for red that figure is 60 times. The biggest single jump comes at the end, with red leaping from 3x at level 4 to 15x at level 5. Coins are untouched by gem levels, and 10,000x caps the lot.

Max win: 20,000x or 10,000x? A 20,000x figure has been copied around from one listing. Against that, ELK's data sheet, product sheet and game page all give 10,000x, and NZ$1,000,000 on the paytable at a NZ$100 bet fits. So 10,000x is what we go with.

Features on the Pirots grid

What moves the feature meter? Some reviews credit scatters alone, and one brings up a duplicator symbol. ELK says any collected symbol adds to the meter, and you won't find a duplicator on a paytable screen. We go with ELK.

Inside Free Drops and Super Bonus

Getting into the Bonus Game takes three golden anchors, all collected by the birds within one game round. Inside it you play Free Drops, the name this pokie gives to free spins. Third-party listings say you begin with 5, and a single review says another three Bonus symbols during the feature add 5 more.

Carry-over is what you should care about here. ELK's product sheet names three things: grid size, gem level and feature meter. The paytable's own list of what stays persistent during Free Drops reads grid size, symbol collection and gem win levels. A single review treats all that as starting from the trigger, which puts the bonus wherever your grid and gems stood when the third anchor came in.

Think of the Super Bonus as the paid version. X-iter is the only route into it that we found, and the panel lists one drop with guaranteed entry, a round on the maximum grid and upgrade symbols that all upgrade every gem. Its start screen shows 5 Free Drops.

Pirots Bonus vs Super Bonus

Is the Free Drops grid 8x8? A single review has the grid expanding to 8x8 in Free Drops. That's not how the paytable and ELK's sheet put it: they say grid size and gem levels persist, so your trigger-time grid is where the bonus begins. A start on maximum grid belongs to the Super Bonus alone.

What X-iter modes cost

Down the left of the screen sits X-iter, a panel of five paid modes. At a NZ$1 bet the panel itself shows these prices: NZ$3, NZ$10, NZ$25, NZ$100 and NZ$500. Not every lobby offers them, because availability depends on the casino and jurisdiction. A Pirots casino version could show the full five, just some or none, so check what you've loaded.

One review gives the feature-buy RTP as 94.0%, the same as the base game. Run that against the 500x Super Bonus and the long-run average comes back at 470x, so each buy costs you 30x on average. Nobody has published a spread of results that we could find, and since rare large wins drag an average upwards, one typical buy may land below that figure. Whatever you pay for a mode, you can lose all of it.

Pirots free: using the demo

Play the demo

You should see the same grid, birds, symbols and paytable in a Pirots demo as in the real game. The only swap is a play-money balance instead of your own. For learning how collection and drops work together, nothing costs less.

The risk is where they part ways. You can't withdraw anything from a demo balance, and what happens there doesn't predict real-money play. Spend an hour on play money and you'll come away knowing the rules, not your odds.

On desktop, ELK's data sheet recommends 1600x900 or a 16:9 ratio, and it says the client adjusts to desktop, tablet or mobile. You don't need an app for a demo Pirots version either, with third-party listings showing it as HTML5.

Not loading? Look at the graphics first. ELK's games rely on canvas and WebGL, it says, so bring your browser up to date and make sure hardware acceleration is on. After that, turn off content blockers for the page, clear the cache and try again. A message about your region is different: the host has set that restriction and nothing on your end will change it.

Pirots RTP, volatility and variance

ELK's data sheet and product sheet both put the Pirots RTP at 94.0%, and we found no other published value. That counts as low in some reviews. One listing also has an RTP ranges tag, so go to the menu, pick Rules and see what your version says. On ELK's scale, volatility sits at 7 of 10.

Some hits barely register: three blue gems at level 1 return 0.15x your bet. ELK's 26.8% hit frequency also means roughly three rounds in four pay nothing at all. So where's the rest of the return? Much of it is tucked away in rare rounds with upgrades, a big grid and coins piling up together. RTP only describes the average across a huge number of rounds, and a single session can finish well below it.

A run that feels rigged, then, is usually just variance behaving the way this design is built to. According to ELK, independent test centres certify its games. That won't promise a good session, and neither will any other pokie.

How volatile is it? Review labels range between medium-high and high. We use 7 of 10, the rating on ELK's own scale. A label is only an opinion, so read those as a rough steer.

Is 94.0% the only RTP? Only 94.0% appears on ELK's sheets, though one listing has an RTP ranges tag. With no other value to be found, 94.0% is what we quote. Casinos can configure games, so check the Rules screen in the version you load.

Pirots strengths and limits

Pirots and its neighbours

• 5x5 is the starting grid here; ELK describes Pirots 2 as 6x6.
• Gem levels stop at 5; in Pirots 2, ELK says, symbols can upgrade up to 7 times.
• There are six feature symbol types here; Pirots 2 has eight, with redrops and popcorn on top.
• Bonus Hunt at 3x gives over four times the bonus chance here; for its 3x mode in Pirots 2, ELK states more than three times.

Our call on this pokie

One idea is what makes Pirots work, and you can explain it in a sentence even though it takes a while to master: birds collect what they touch, gems level up, the grid grows. It's always clear why a round paid. Upgrades carry real weight too, given a top red gem is worth 60 times its starting value.

Return is the downside. With 94.0% and volatility at 7 of 10, that design has a price, and feature buys won't alter it. Before you play Pirots with real money, we'd get the rules down in the demo and only then pick a stake, knowing most rounds pay little or nothing.